Block unwanted traffic in Google Analytics
Published on February 25, 2015
Published on Wealthy Affiliate — a platform for building real online businesses with modern training and AI.
Unwanted traffic
I'm always skeptical when I get traffic from strange looking sites. Russian scam site for instance. Most of the time the traffic come from unreliable sources and scam pages that send unwanted traffic to your site. Luckily it's possible to filter out this traffic in Google Analytics.
Today I filtered out a page called o-o-6-o-o. com. Here's the list over other pages I have blocked:
NOTE: I had to add a space before the .com here on the blog site to make sure the links can't be clicked on...
- The IP to blackhatwoth. com which are 78.110.60. 230
- BlackHatWorth. com
- Iskalko. ru
- darodar. com
- ILoveVitaly. com
- Lombia. co
- Econom. co
- Pricereg. com
- semalt. com
- hulfingtonpost. com
- bestwebsideawards. com
- o-o-6-o-o. com
- humanorightswatch. org
If you see strange names like these in your traffic google it and try to find out if its scam. I usually enter "what is blackhatworth. com" for instance in google. Don't go into the site itself.
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These sites are automated pages which give you fake traffic, give you the wrong impression on how many people are visiting your site and can also damage your relationship to dear old Google if they think you do this on purpose to get traffic.
How to block fake traffic:
It's a bit of a manual process but here's how I do it. Suggestions for other ways are welcome. I do this on all my sites.
1. Enter Google Analytics and log in.
2.Click Admin on the top right.
3. Be sure to select the correct account on the left side.
4. Click Filter on the right side somewhere.
5. Click New Filter
6. Create New Filter
7. Filter Type -> Custom
8. Be sure that Exclude is selected and choose Referral under Filter Field
9. Enter the site you want to filter out, for instance 'o-o-6-o-o. com', under Filter Pattern
10. Click Save.
It may take some a few days, but eventually you will stop seeing traffic from the filtered out pages in Google Analytics and get a cleaner and more real feedback on who's visiting your page.
I'm not completely sure if this bad traffic actually is blocked, but at least it will be invisible and hidden and not an annoying problem anymore.
Hope that was helpful.
Andreas
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